Pull Me Back, I Am Drifting
by Chrmdpoet
Summary: She sucks in a sharp breath when Rachel comes, head ducked and steps timid. Quinn's gaze never makes it past Rachel's left hand, third finger. She stares at the naked flesh for what feels like hours.


Pull Me Back, I Am Drifting

She hears the beeps of the monitors before she even manages to struggle to the surface of consciousness. Her eyelids feel heavy, too heavy to flutter, to open, to care. She lays there, still and aching, aching in ways she cannot even begin to define in words, and the beeps make her brow furrow, her heart jump, jump. She hears each leap in beeping time.

Her nose tingles and twitches with the scent that filters through—clean, she thinks. She's never smelled something so clean yet so heavy, marked somehow with a hint of sorrow. Does sorrow have a smell?

Quinn thinks maybe she is dreaming, the prickling sensations along her flesh reminding her of that hazy state between waking and sleeping, when the numbness begins to leak away in twinging tremors.

She thinks maybe she doesn't want to know if she isn't dreaming. Maybe she doesn't want to know if she is.

* * *

Her chest burns like fire, wild and raging, when the flashes of the wreck and the wreckage come screaming back into her mind, when the doctor pricks her legs and feet with needles she can see but can't will herself to feel.

Her stomach coils and coils, so tight that she thinks it might concave, so wired she thinks she might explode. Bile soars up her throat and stings at the back of her mouth, dances bitterly on her tongue. She frees it in the small basin on her bedside table.

The nurses say nothing as they take it away, and Quinn watches them go, walking, walking, walking.

She can't feel her nails in her thigh.

* * *

She stares at the ceiling and feels too old for her body, too weathered for this life. She prays, asks God why He compresses old souls to make them fit into younger bodies, to make them suffer this feeling of never belonging.

Of whys and whys and whys.

And constant pain.

She hates the silence that always follows.

* * *

She sucks in a sharp breath when Rachel comes, head ducked and steps timid.

Quinn's gaze never makes it past Rachel's left hand, third finger. She stares at the naked flesh for what feels like hours.

"Quinn, I—"

Her voice is ragged when she cuts Rachel off. "You didn't marry him," Quinn croaks, and she stares into brown eyes that look like dark oceans, wet and deep, and pulling her out to sea.

Rachel shakes her head and slips onto the edge of the bed.

Quinn breathes easy when the weight of Rachel's palm cloaks her fingers, pressing and squeezing and pulling her back from whatever twisted ledge she was walking.

* * *

"I was rushing," Quinn chokes out, eyes set forward as she rolls through the chilly park, blanket draped across her limbs as if they can feel.

Rachel's hands touch her shoulder, and Quinn sighs, leaning into the soft back of the wheelchair Rachel pushes.

"That day," Quinn whispers, hands twisted together in her lap. "That day, I was rushing."

"The wedding?" Rachel quietly asks, and Quinn nods, her throat thick with lumps she can't seem to swallow down. Rachel squeezes her shoulder and says, "I waited for you."

Quinn closes her eyes and slides her hand up her own chest until her fingers sweep over Rachel's. She latches on, squeezes. "I think I would have asked you to," she whispers. "To wait, I mean."

She feels her heart pulse like bird song and drum beats and renewed hope when Rachel drops a kiss to the top of her head.

* * *

She takes her shaky first step before she is ready and tumbles forward.

Rachel's arms swoop around her, a wash of dark hair slipping across her nose and lips and chin. Quinn inhales the scent and closes her eyes.

All she sees is the naked flesh of Rachel's finger. She sees it all the time, like a promise, a dare, a hope, a pale reminder of some screwed-up destiny Quinn cannot even begin to understand but craves nonetheless.

She lets Rachel catch her, hold her, encourage her to try again.

Quinn sighs in her arms, atop her lap, and shakes her head. Her hand slips to the back of Rachel's neck before the girl can speak a word, and pulls Rachel down, down, down.

She kisses her like she is seventeen again, in her soul and not just her bones.

She feels Rachel's pleased sigh against her lips, feels Rachel's fingertips skirt across her knees.


End file.
